Books of 2020- Installment #10

46. Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer

This is the full-length novel that came out of Naomi Kritzer's amazing short story Cat Pictures Please! And it is fabulous!! It's a little more YA than I was expecting and it went places I wasn't anticipating, but it's a delightful read!

47. The Graveyard Shift by Darynda Jones
Darynda, Darynda, Darynda 你不要不說話. Yeah, so I love reading Darynda Jones's writing!! And this novella takes us back to Charley Davidson's world!! We learn a lot more about Garrett Swopes and his guardianship of Beep.

48. My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
This book got rave reviews in multiple places so when I saw the audiobook was available at the library, I decided to pick it up. It's interesting looking into what you will and will not do for the people you love even if they do some decidedly terrible things.

49. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Nam-joo Cho
If you read this book and it didn't make you mad or filled you with rage, you didn't read it! Go back and read it again!

50. Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street by Heda Margolius Kovály & translated by Alex Zucker

This is a really engaging mystery set in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. It was very noir-y and cool to read about this place and time. The author's life which is detailed in the foreword (by her son) is absolutely fascinating!! I think that if you don't keep in mind that this book is set right after WWII, you can totally enjoy this book, but if you keep it in mind, there are all kinds of layers added on to this story.

I've read 50 books and 42 were by woman, 6 were by men, 1 was an anthology by both women and men, 1 was by a nonbinary author, and 5 were translations. My year of reading lots of women and at least 12 translations is going well in that I've read mostly female authors, but the world is going through a pandemic and state sanctioned murders in the form of police brutality with a horrible man still at the helm and supported by horrible men in the Congress. In short this year has been really rough. What will this global health crisis leave us with? What changes will we make, not only in terms of the huge inequities of our health system where people of color and the poor (which let's face it- the system works really hard to ensure that people of color, especially black people, are poor) are more than extremely disadvantaged, but also all the other ways in which our society, our systems, actively damage people of color? Only time will tell. But I hope it is a greater sense of community, a need to care for one and another and support each other, not just people with the same colored skin as ourselves, not just people with the same sized wallet as ours. I hope all of this isolation leaves us wanting to lift each other up and not hold others down.